I’m perfectly content with letting Lemmy grow organically. If it achieves a wider user base, great, but I’m also fine if it doesn’t. I think any attempts to deliberately make it more palatable to a wider audience should be heavily scrutinized, though. This isn’t to say all changes such an audience would want are bad, or should be denied, but I’ve seen too many sites completely shit on the wants and needs of their existing users in order to have broader appeal, and I would rather avoid that.

Normies flood in growth is exciting for awhile, they drown out and dismantle out the core group by sheer volume, they take over things start to feel like every other social site, ???, profit, corpo takeover, enshitification, decline.

Hopefully Lemmy is built different enough to break this process, but so was everything else until it made someone money.

I like that the fediverse is mostly a safe space for all sorts of minorities (especially queer/trans people and autistics). I’m pretty happy not having facists call me retarded and/or treat me like an idiot for being autistic and/or having leftist opinions (although I suspect this still happens here).

By becoming mainstream, the platform will be flooded with nationalist propaganda and hate speech.

Also: There’s still some fuckery around Lemmy.world and the communist instances. Just let people have political ideology. They aren’t harming anyone.

Yes, I want to build up an alternative to big tech controlled social media so working class people can have our own voices magnified.

I’d take “normies” any day over people who classify others as “normies”.

I don’t see why we would want to gatekeep the fediverse. If more people decided to use it over centralized social media, I think that’d be a positive development.

And as you know, the fediverse is far from homogeneous. I expect there will always be some very big general purpose “normie” instances like lemmy.world, and smaller, more niche ones for specific communities.

Nah, I talk to the public for a living. Give me a the high-effort weirdos here, please.

The fediverse is about offering an alternative to the monopoly power and political control of the large corporate sites. The more people are here, the less control those have. That is a good thing and far more important than any kind of elitist snobbery people here like to indulge in.

More niche interests, less politics. A niche community could move to Lemmy instead of hosting their own forum for example. Either hosting their own instance or using an existing one.

I sympathize with people who like niche internet communities, but the main thing I want to see happen is the collapse and replacement of centralized social media sites, especially reddit, so the more people the better.

A rising tide lifts all ships. A larger userbase doesn’t just mean “normies”, it means a wider variety of demographics, fandoms, and views.

And that in turn means that somewhere in the large userbase will be more people who match my freak. The main thing I used Reddit for was niche hobbies and fandoms, but over here I suspect I might be the only person on this platform who’s into my specific hyperfixations. If the userbase was large enough, there might be a chance to try and establish communities for some of those things.

But perhaps most importantly, I want this place to grow to prove that alternatives to the corporate social media platforms can succeed. And in order to do that, we do need “normies”, we need to pull them away from those corporate platforms.

A lot of normies won’t be using Lemmy or fediverse in general. It is not as addictive or personalised as the mainstream social media. Plus an avg joe doesn’t know whan an instance is. If one instance starts to get too many users, it might just shut down sign ups.

Edit: Lemmy also doesn’t have an “official” app. So it adds even more friction. Yeah a few users might get excited and use it for a couple of days and then just go back to reddit.

I feel like this is a new user phenomenon.

When I first started on the fediverse I was kind of an obnoxious evangelist for decentralized social media.

Fast forward some years and I still love it and think it’s far superior to the closed corporate monoplatforms, but I’m also fine if the fediverse stays roughly where it is. But I’d also be happy if more people were to discover that you can be on social media without funding billionaires’ future killbot funds.

I worry a bit about waves of “normies” coming in and redditing up the place, but remind myself that federation is voluntary and I can always just go join the smaller networks that will inevitably pop up.

Like I also use snac2 to access the fediverse, and the opt-in nature of that implementation makes slowly and deliberately building a network graph of cool people feel really good.

One thing late-stage Reddit really had going for it is that, for any niche topic or hobby, you could find a sizeable active community.

I still have to visit that place from time to time, but I’d rather be on Lemmy.